Cortex Classic System Role Playing Game

Your Story...

Leap into a game where the characters and the drama are at the heart of the story, where the action is fast-paced and the dice roll freely. The Cortex System Role Playing Game offers you a fun set of rules that are flexible enough for any genre, setting, and storyline you can imagine!

Character creation lets you run with a concept and be ready-to-play in less than half an hour. The rules make it easy for new players to understand, and allow the Game Master freedom to improvise when the action takes an unexpected turn. The Cortex System rules provide a simple, intuitive foundation upon which the rest of the game is built—everything from an honorable duel withswords, the repair of a starship engine, psychic powers, criminal investigation, and anything in-between.

This book takes a toolkit approach, with all the rules needed to play and a host of options and add-ons. We give you some examples, and a whole chapter full of advice—but the rest is up to you! Bring your dice, some friends, and your imagination to play in a game with no limits.

...Cortex Classic System Rules

This is the final, press-ready version of the book that includes the Afterword, two versions of the character sheet, PDF bookmarks, and a full index!

Note: While the PDF edition is an electronic file, the Softcover edition had to be built from a scanned book. The original production files were no longer available.

I am new to the cortex rules but I love them. They are easy to use and easy to learn when creating a game. No complaints from me here. I use a lot of game settings but Cortex I will definitely use at some point. [...]

A solid and very playable game. It takes a lot of tinkering to get it just how you want for a particular game, but it is worth it. Unfortunately, it does suffer from some balance issues in their advantage/disadvantage system. Even with those problems, [...]

So I found cortex on a youtube review, and I thought it sounded intriguing. I got it, and tried it, and was not happy. I hear that many people like it, but I just don't know why, it seems clunky, and unbalanced in all its forms. I does not focus on gamepl [...]

I've had the Cortex core rules for a while now, and on the whole I like it. The basic mechanics are simple and very flexible--so it's easy to improvise in play, and very hackable outside play. Each attribute, skill, and trait is rated as a die size (d4, [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.